Since there are many ways to solve problems with Perl, why has no-one created a standalone server-side Perl engine that would be similar to PHP's Zend or Java's Tomcat?

mod_perl is very cool, but is out of the reach of individuals/organisations that want a dynamic website but cannot afford a dedicated server - not only does this defeat one of the main benefits of open source software (i.e. cost) it has also forced many Perl programmers to learn/migrate to PHP.